My background is mathematics. A master’s degree to be precise. I love maths. It’s art.

It’s good to think back about maths once in a while, even though the field of computing has hijacked my mind and ambitions for many decades now. The paper introduced in this article about maths is a stunning reminder of what mathematics is really about. Beauty. The power of ideas. A fantastic introduction for anyone interested in finding out what real mathematics is.

I recommend reading the first 10 pages of that 25-page document. Much of the rest is about maths education. The author is clearly on a rant - but all the way to the end his arguments expose the infinite beauty of mathematics in all its simplicity.

Update - there are very strange alleys in that labyrinth called “mathematics”. Such as this example from a recent discussion:

   All elements of the empty set are floats.
   All elements of the empty set are ints.
   Ints are not floats.
   Therefore all elements of the empty set are not floats.

It leads to areas such as meta-mathematics and my all time favorite: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Fascinating, but mind-bending. At times painfully so. If you’re more interested in (near-tangible) beauty, stick to Lockhart’s article above.

Seth Godin, again, hits the nail on the head in his weblog - describing the two ways in which companies can hire free-lancers.

I’m squarely a type one person by now.

One of my last clients called me / us “cowboys”. We completed the project on time, on budget, and on spec even though it was clearly a panic-mode project by the time we got involved, but I turned down a follow-up proposal. Because they were clearly in the type two camp. From a business standpoint, they were probably right, but I sure would have loved to tackle that challenge with a clean sheet of paper.

Soît.

This weblog has been slowing down for some time now, as you probably have noticed. The reason is that I’ve been shifting gears to a new (but not necessarily disjunct) direction. These past few months I’ve been involved in a number of new projects dealing with “Physical Computing”. Tiny / cheap hardware has become very powerful these days, and the revolution is that these are both very easy to interface to the real world through sensors and actuators and that the whole thing can be programmed in standard C / C++ using gcc.

I stumbled upon that new world last year, and decided to really get into it. In a distant past, long before the PC was invented, I used to build (and blow up) amplifiers, then simple digital circuits, then crude microprocessors - so it’s really all a fascinating bridge back to the past. I’ve been interested in getting to grips with energy consumption around the house for quite some time now, and all of a sudden there is this technology which makes it possible, affordable, and fun!

Lots of people seem to be getting into this now. It’s not likely that someone will come up with something as advanced as an iPhone - but what’s so amazing is that the technology is essentially the same. The playing field is leveling out to an amazing degree, because now just about anyone can get into exploring, designing, and developing hardware (and the firmware / software that makes it do things, which is usually the bigger challenge).

Anyway, in an attempt to create a structure for myself, I’ve set up the Jee Lab - a weblog and a physical area in my office to explore and learn more about this new world. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to track my progress there. It’s all open - open source, open hardware, open hype? ... whatever.

This weblog is the spot where I will continue to post all other opinions, ideas, and things of interest - as well as news regarding the software projects which remain as near and dear to me as ever: Metakit, Tclkit, Vlerq, and more.

... to Seth Godin, for his insightful one-man show - day in, day out.

DEVONthink Pro Office is one of many in the very crowded space of document organizers / archivers. They announced the 2.0 beta a while back which caused me to look at it again. And just now, there was a 2.0b3 release with a long-awaited OCR upgrade. I was already sold and bought a license last year. I also have a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M, which all by itself combines a great set of features into a very effective workflow.

Well... DTPO 2.0b + S510M are P H E N O M E N A L when used together.

It scans all my paper, from doodles to invoices to books. It converts text and inserts it invisibly into the PDF with all text indexed / searchable (and the big news in 2.0b3 is that the resulting PDF sizes are excellent). And now the biggie: DT can take these documents and auto-categorize them into different folders which already contain a few example documents.

So the workflow is: insert paper, push button, insert paper, push button, etc. Then as each OCR completes: enter some title (I just enter the main name / keyword, duplicate titles are fine). Finally, auto-categorize all documents in the inbox, and voilá; everything has been filed for eternity.

You can create “replicas” in DT to place a document in multiple folders, very much like a Unix hard link.

There’s a scriptlet which can be installed in Safari as bookmark, and since I’ve added it as 3rd item on my bookmarks bar, CMD+3 creates a web archive of the current page in DT (even with the bookmark bar hidden). There are also Dashboard widgets.

Again: auto-categorize puts these captured pages in a folder with documents most like it. And of course all documents can be found regardless of how they are organized, by entering a few characters in DT’s search box.

Did I mention how unbelievably effective this all is? Oh, yeah, I did ;)

PS. Other recent discovery I’ve started using heavily is DropBox. Syncing done right (uses Amazon’s S3). Bonus feature is automatic photo galleries, such as this one.